Windows Folders Taking Ages to Open

For the past few months some of my Windows folders have started to take a while to open in Explorer. A great example of this is the Download folder, whenever I click it in the navigation list on the left I get a scrolling screen bar in the navigation area and it can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 2 minutes to load.

My first thought was that its progressive downward spiral in performance was due to its increase in size over time, its a download folder so that kinda makes sense right? First I disabled my Anti-virus and gave it another try, no joy.

I then started experimenting with different folders and discovered that if you open a folder, right click on the white space inside the folder and open properties there is a Customize tab.

Folder Properties – Customize Tab

In this is a drop down with a selection of different folder types to optimize the folder for, in my case it had defaulted to Pictures which was probably causing Windows to try and generate thumbnails or show images for loads of 1GB+ files. Once I changed this to “General Items” the load time returned to normal and I can now open my Download and other folders in seconds!

Feel free to leave a comment if this helped or you found other fixes for this.